SMOS sea surface salinity and soil moisture products developed and distributed by the Barcelona Expert Center

The Climate Symposium 2014, 13-17 October 2014, Darmstadt, Germany.-- 1 pageOn November 2, 2009 the European Space Agency’s (ESA) launched the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite carrying onboard a microwave synthetic aperture radiometer operating at 1.4 GHz. The mission's goal is to provide Sea Surface Salinity and Soil Moisture observations, with a spatial resolution of 30-50 km, and a required accuracy suitable for climate studies. The SMOS Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) develops and distributes sea surface salinity (SSS) and soil moisture (SM) maps in NetCDF format at http://cp34-bec.cmima.csic.es/. For ocean applications the following SSS products are being served at spatial resolution of 0.25 degrees: · Level 3 maps derived from spatial and temporal weighted averages of level 2 SSS data. Three- and nine-day average maps for every 3 days are available. · Level 3 maps derived from optimal interpolation of level 2 SSS data. Nine-day maps for every 3 days are available. · Level 4 maps from SMOS SSS fused with remote sensing SST. Nine-day maps for every 3 days. · Daily Singularity Exponents products obtained by applying singularity analysis on OSTIA SST products (http://myocean.eu/) are also served. L3 and L4 maps are validated with near-surface measurements provided by Argo profilers, and their expected accuracy is 0.2-0.4 depending on processing level and the region of interest. For land applications, a downscaling algorithm which combines SMOS with MODIS VIS/IR satellite data into 1km SM maps has been implemented at SMOS-BEC. High resolution (1 km) soil moisture maps are derived with this technique over the Iberian Peninsula and are distributed through SMOS-BEC maps server web page in near real time (delay < 6h). Moreover, soil moisture level 3 products are computed by monthly, seasonal and annual temporal averages of level 2 soil moisture data at 0.25º spatial resolutionPeer Reviewe